Rouge(47)

Now Chip grins when he sees Mother walking toward him in her white suit, which she bought with her Bay discount—what Mother calls the one saving grace. When I look at Chip grinning, I think of wolves dressed as sheep. Fangs hidden in the woolly white. She gets in the car, which opens funny, sort of like the doors of the car in Back to the Future. She doesn’t see me watching her from the window. Fogging up the glass. Telling her don’t go.

“Get away from the window, Belle,” Grand-Maman says. Sitting behind me in her nightgown of pink lace, eating religieuse and watching All My Children in her dark corner. Even in the bright June afternoon, Grand-Maman somehow makes wherever she sits a dark corner. Her jeweled fingers are sticky with syrup. She’s taken her teeth out so she can taste. I become aware of the smell of her. Old bread and throw up and Shalimar. Jewels clinking softly. Stones of all shades shimmering from her neck, her wrists, her fingers. Some given to her by her dead husband, my grand-père, and by my father back when he was courting Mother. Other men too. Apparently, everyone used to give Grand-Maman gold like she was royalty. Now she drips with it. She was a great beauty once, Mother says. When she says that, I think of Grand-Maman’s drooping mouth and her tiny eyes in her bloodless face. Her gray-white hair sticking up like an electrocuted puffball. What happened? I asked Mother. And for a second I thought she was going to smack me. But she just shrugged. She threw it away. She gave it up.

If I had beauty, I decided then, I would never throw it away. I would never give it up.

Now that Mother has driven away with Chip, I brace myself for Grand-Maman to tell me about the end of the world. The horse-filled dark. Her eyes going black. Mother doesn’t tell me about it enough, Grand-Maman says. Mother’s forgotten herself since she moved down to Montreal from the north. Speaking English to her unbaptized daughter. Not even going to mass most Sundays. If it weren’t for Grand-Maman, Grand-Maman says, my soul might be lost entirely to Darkness. But today Grand-Maman says nothing. Just stares at All My Children like she’s not even seeing it. She tells me to go to my room and play.

“Okay,” I say. And on this day, I walk down the hall like I’m going there. But I’m not going there. I keep going down the hall. To the very end of it. To the blue-and-white room I love that smells like dreams. I’m careful to turn the knob of the door a certain way so that Grand-Maman doesn’t hear the sound. When I open the door, I sigh. Blue walls the color of the sky. Blue velvet curtains that filter out the light. There’s the great white wicker bed with the clean blue-and-white sheets. There’s her closet on the left. There’s her white wicker vanity on the right with her tray of perfume bottles in so many glass shapes. Tears and stars and strange flowers, gifted by Mother’s friends at the beauty counters. I have to be so careful in Mother’s bedroom. Because of the wicker, everything hisses when I sit on it, when I touch it, even.

The closet door is white and tall, very closed. I see Mother saying, Don’t open this door. Promise me. When I open the gliding door, I’m very slow. I’ve done this before. I know how to glide it very quietly.

Dark in here. Can’t seem to find the light switch. But I feel Mother’s clothes hanging on either side of me. I smell their violets and smoke. Mother sorts them by color, but mostly there’s just the three colors she loves best: white and black and red. She loves red most. Because of her hair and her eyes, she says. Also her skin—what she calls her coloring. Everybody has a season based on their coloring, Belle. Mother read this in Vogue magazine. Mother is a Winter, she says. What am I? I asked her. Probably a Fall, she said, because of my coloring. It’s all coloring, Sunshine.

What colors am I if I’m a Fall?

Olive, Mother said. Earth. Rust. Mustard. Don’t those sound nice?

No. Those all sounded like nightmare colors to me. What if I don’t want to be a Fall?

Well, Glum Drop, I don’t make the rules, do I? And Mother pointed to her magazine. See? It was Vogue that made the rules, not Mother.

Still can’t find the light in the closet, but I can sort of see in the dark now. Anyway, I know what I’m looking for. I sense them there. Second shelf from the bottom, third pair from the left. Glowing like a wish. Red satin with pointed, feathery toes. Spiked high heels. They show off Mother’s white feet in a red strappy web. Like lingerie for the feet, Mother said when she bought them. And I said, What’s lingerie? And she said, Never mind.

Carefully, I reach out my hand and pick them up. Slip them on while sitting on the floor. How come you never wear these outside? I asked Mother once.

Because they’re not for outside.

There are shoes for only inside?

There are shoes for everything.

What are these for, then?

Never mind, Belle.

But I knew. These shoes were for sex. Knowing that made me as red as the shoes. Thinking of Mother having sex. Mother and Chip. Mother and the Troll. I heard sounds sometimes through the bedroom wall at night, and I wondered if what I was hearing was sex. I didn’t know what sex was, not exactly. Apart from what Mother had shown me in a children’s book called What’s the Big Secret? It starred two ugly old people, a cartoon man and a cartoon woman, who were always naked and smiling and holding hands. I hated that book. My secret best friend, Stacey, who is two years older than me because I skipped a year and she was held back a year, says sex is nothing like that dumb book at all.